Some of St. Paul’s most popular public schools are under major budget stress as the school district works to prop up overall enrollment while also cutting costs.

At Capitol Hill Gifted and Talented Magnet, parents are upset about a significant funding cut coming this fall and a corresponding reduction in students and teachers.

The latest calculation of poverty put the grades 1-8 schools just below the district threshold to qualify for Title I funding. Parents say the lost revenue is forcing the school to cut seven teachers, despite having the district’s largest student waiting list, at 355.

“I really hope that you will change your mind and give us the money we need,” Capitol Hill second-grader Lynnie Krautbauer told the school board Tuesday night.

Board member Steve Marchese pressed staff on the logic of holding down enrollment at Capitol Hill.

“Why would we ever not want to have kids filling space if there’s capacity?” he said.

Chief operating officer Jackie Turner said all of the district’s schools are quality schools. She said it would be “fiscally irresponsible” to pack in students at one school at the expense of others.

“We have to be able to provide that distribution … throughout the entire district,” she said.

Marchese said if families aren’t choosing a particular school, “that’s a message” about whether the district can sustain it. Instead of protecting those schools, he said the district should look to replicate its more popular school models.

Turner said there are other factors limiting Capitol Hill’s enrollment. Benjamin E. Mays IB World School, which shares the building, is growing, she said, and preschool programming there is strong.

“We feel we’re at capacity,” she said.

If Capitol Hill wants more students, Turner said, parents and staff can waive class size caps. But adding another teacher would require taking one away from another school, she said.

Like Capitol Hill, the grades 6-12 Open World Learning Community also will lose its Title I funding in the fall, chief financial officer Marie Schrul said. OWL’s waiting list is 89 students.

The district is wrestling with a $17.2 million budget deficit for the fall.

Schrul said much of that gap can be made up through eliminating one-time expenses from the current school year and through cuts to district programs, which she’ll detail at the board’s next meeting.

Much of the district’s budget woes are related to a several-year slide in K-12 enrollment. Turner delivered a mixed report Tuesday about enrollment for next year.

Josh has written about St. Paul public schools and higher education for the Pioneer Press since 2014, 11 years after the paper first published his byline as a University of Minnesota intern. He did a two-year stint on city government and crime in Austin, Minn., and spent seven years in Sioux Falls, S.D. covering crime and education, as well as editing. Josh was good at baseball once. Now he plays tennis against old men.

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